Amor Mundi

Failing Institutions of Democracy

Roger Berkowitz
Glenn Greenwald, who lives in Brazil, offers a deep dive into the specific Brazilian background to the riots where “supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro stormed the Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Presidential Palace, killing nobody but causing substantial property damage.”

New Opportunities for Creativity

Roger Berkowitz
While on vacation in Rome with his wife, the writer Hanif Kureishi collapsed. While in a small public hospital outside of the city, he has been dictating a blog chronicling his medical situation along with side thoughts about the world. In one of the first posts, a nurse asks him, “How long did it take you to write ‘Midnight’s Children?’” She has confused him with his friend Salman Rushdie. Kureishi wrote. “I replied, ‘If I had indeed written ‘Midnight’s Children,’ don’t you think I would have gone private?” Kureishi’s blog has become widely popular, for good reason.

The Attack on Academic Thinking  

Roger Berkowitz
Len Gutkin tells of the egregious abrogation of academic freedom and intellectual integrity at Hamline University, where a art-history professor was fired for teaching about a medieval image of the prophet Muhammad.

All Academic Thinking is Conservative

Roger Berkowitz
Jordi Graupera met Richard Bernstein when Graupera was a Ph.D. student at the New School in 2008. Last year, Graupera asked Bernstein to audit his final seminar on Hannah Arendt. Graupera’s account of that final class and his tribute to his teacher are well worth reading. So too is his retelling of Bernstein’s story of how he first met Arendt. 

Your Silence Will Not Protect You

Roger Berkowitz
Clem Cecil translates the speech by the Russian Poet and editor Alla Gutnikova at her trial at which she was accused and convicted of “encouraging minors to take part in demonstrations in support of Alexei Navalny last spring.”

The Gift of Dangerous Thinking

Transcendence and Finitude: In Memory of Drucilla Cornell

Roger Berkowitz
Drucilla Cornell died on Monday, Dec 12, 2022. Drucilla was one of the most unique and self-possessed people I’ve met, someone who could laugh and cry unapologetically, often in quick succession. Her friends whom she collected and loved included academics, trainers, and people she encountered daily in shops and on the street. Her annual Christmas party was a place to witness her loving community. It was to be held this year on Dec. 16th. Sadly, we must instead mourn Drucilla’s passing. Those who knew Drucilla miss her; we all are richer for her work. 

The Twitter Files

Roger Berkowitz
Since Elon Musk bought Twitter and started dismantling the company’s bureaucratic infrastructure, he has also begun a process of coming clean about Twitter’s highly idiosyncratic way of censoring posts and contributors. Instead of releasing the files at once, Musk is letting them out in parts and has tasked the journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and others with writing about the files on Twitter itself. 

The Pillars Have Shattered

For Hannah Arendt, the rise of science, and the loss of civilization's pillars- religion, customs, and traditions- helped lead to the loss of a shared world. This process turned us inside ourselves, towards a radical subjectivization that she termed world alienation, which left us only with our own subjective truths, sealed off from any shared common sense. In a new essay, Marilynne Robinson argues for a reconciliation between science and religion. She writes that it is not simply that science deals with facts and religion with meaning; there are seeming facts of the world such as time and space that are impervious to scientific knowledge. And religion, while it offers traditions of meaningfulness, must grapple with the meaning of a scientific world aimed at progress.